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It was Christmas 2002, and we were celebrating the holidays in Vermont — my mother, several of my grown siblings and I — all of us staying at the home of my youngest sister. It so happened that another of my sisters had that year purchased multiple copies of a recently published book, and she had stuffed a volume into each of our stockings.

The book in question recounts a journey that our paternal grandfather made in 1909 — by dogsled, no less — on a route that stretched from Quebec City, his home, to Newfoundland, a trek that lasted three turbulent months. He was an independent fur trader, one of the last exemplars of a vanishing breed. Thanks to a variety of lucky circumstances, his journal had been published in book form, with an introduction and annotations by a Montreal academic named Philip E. L. Smith.

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Entitled In Quest of Fur: The Travel Journal of William O. K. Ross, 1909, the book kept all of us rapt for the rest of that day, as we devoured our ancestor's tale of an almost mythic odyssey, an adventure that was previously all but unknown to us. The diary of that journey begins with intriguing precision combined with a nonchalant air:

“Having decided to make another winter trip with my dogs and komatik (sled) down the Labrador coast, I had been quietly making notes of the different things which I would require such as (medicines) carbolic Vaseline, carbolic acid, assortment of bandages 1 and one-half inches up to three inches, painkiller and some cough remedies not forgetting a bottle of tincture of iodine, and a small sash tool brush with which to apply it for cold in chest or back. Ginger and painkiller I use as hot drink and no liquors as I find they are not necessary on a long and cold journey.”

With that one passage, my grandfather had me fascinated, and he likely would have drawn me in even if I weren't closely related to him by blood. But here's the thing: I am. All of which may help to explain how it came to pass that I found myself, 12 years later, on a cool but shimmering Monday afternoon in late May, searching through the sun-dappled lawns of the Mount Hermon Cemetery in Sillery, Que., a suburb of Quebec City. I was in search of ghosts.

I had finally decided to make good on an ambition I had long carried around in my mind. I meant to trace, more or less, the route that my grandfather took on that 1909 journey, mostly by dogsled, a trip that extended from Quebec City along the north shore of the St. Lawrence to Blanc-Sablon, an anglo outpost at the eastern tip of Quebec — and beyond.

I wasn't kidding myself. I was fully aware that my trek would be child's play compared to his. But this is a story of appearances and disappearances, and so I decided to follow the man in the only way I knew how, by going where he had gone. After all, if you have only phantoms to chase, then you chase phantoms.

I never knew my grandfather.

That is no surprise, considering he died a decade before I was born. But that is not what I mean when I say I never knew him. I mean that I knew almost nothing about him.

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My own father never spoke of him, or not to me. On the other hand, I never asked about the man, either. I was young and, like many young people, I had little interest in my ancestry. If I had any sense of my grandfather at all, it consisted of a vague awareness that he had been a reprobate of some kind, a man who failed to shoulder his domestic duties, an adventurer and absconder, someone who abandoned his family. His name was almost never mentioned. You could say that he was the vanishing act in our family — the man who wasn't there.

Yet he had existed, of course — my father and his three siblings were proof of that — and I now know that William O.K. Ross was an adventurer of unusual courage and accomplishment. He was quite possibly the first Euro-Canadian to travel by dogsled in a straight run from Quebec City to Red Bay, a remote outpost on the far eastern tip of Labrador. That's a distance of 1,600 kilometres, across terrain bedevilled by obstacles and hardship. The journey took him from mid-March to early June, and I don't believe he complained even once along the way.

My grandfather was also among the first men to make the treacherous springtime crossing from Labrador across the Strait of Belle Isle to Newfoundland, a voyage by frail wooden dory imperilled by icebergs, deadly currents and ice floes that could easily carry an unlucky sailor far out to sea, as very nearly happened to my grandfather.

He was 45 years old at the time and among the last of the independent fur traders in Quebec, tough-minded adventurers who raced by dogsled through the dense pine and birch forests and across the granite-slab archipelagos that describe much of the north shore of the St. Lawrence River, as it wallows east toward the Atlantic, eventually swelling into the vast Gulf of St. Lawrence.

I know about these accomplishments now only because my grandfather decided to keep a journal of his travels that one year, 1909, something he did not do before or after, or not as far as I know. It is thanks only to considerable good fortune that the document still exists.

Somehow, the diary found its way into the McCord Museum on Sherbrooke St. W. in Montreal and is now housed in the archives there. In normal circumstances, however, almost no one would ever have known about it. After all, the document has long been hidden away in one drawer among countless other drawers, all contained in a secure, climate-controlled section of the museum that is not open to the general public.

But a Montreal archeologist and historian named Philip E. L. Smith happened to drop by the McCord one day during the 1990s, meaning to conduct research on a different subject, when an archivist at the museum decided to show him my grandfather's diary, thinking it might be of some interest to him.

That was the second stroke of luck.

A long-time Persian specialist who had done many years of field work in Iran, Smith was not the first person you'd think of if the subject at hand was the fur traders who once roamed the northeastern wilds of Lower Canada and the great northern reaches of Newfoundland.

But Smith was born and raised in Fortune, N.L., and nursed an abiding interest in the history of that territory. In any case, he was soon seized by the contents of my grandfather's journal. He wound up spending the next 10 years of his life whittling away at what seems to have been a labour of love or, possibly, obsession.

Produced by a Newfoundland publisher, In Quest of Fur was not exactly a bestseller, but it is a fascinating work nonetheless, providing a rare glimpse of the tactics and schemes employed roughly a century ago by independent fur traders in the Canadian north, a vanishing breed even in those long-ago days, as the fur industry was steadily being taken over by large commercial outfits such as The Hudson's Bay Company and Révillon Frères, a French enterprise.

Combined with Smith's lengthy introduction and his copious end notes, the diary also provides a vibrant and compelling sketch of my grandfather's skills, values, and temperament — in short, a rough portrait of his life at least as it was lived when he was in his mid-40s. Along with a sequence of 65 black-and-white photographs, mostly relating to that 1909 journey and all housed at the McCord Museum as well, the diary provides the only such outline that I or my four siblings and our two cousins — the grandchildren of William Oliver Kennedy Ross — will likely ever possess. His own immediate offspring, including my father, are dead.

And so, after flying to Quebec City one morning late in May, I made straight for the Mount Hermon Cemetery in neighbouring Sillery. I knew my grandfather was not buried beneath Mount Hermon's sloping, chiaroscuro lawns. In fact, no one knows where he is interred or even if he was ever buried at all; he may well have been cremated. The mystery of his resting place represents yet another of the many disappearing acts he performed during, or after, his life.

Still, even though my grandfather is not buried at Mount Hermon, his father — my great-grandfather — is. So is my grandfather's mother, my great-grandmother.

That seemed a good place to begin.

2. Setting out

In which my grandfather departs Quebec City, meaning to travel by dogsled to Labrador, even though he has only one dog in his possession — and no sled.

In the opening pages of his 1909 journal, my grandfather described the painstaking process by which he accumulated the many items he would need on his journey and packed them one by one into his trunk. He took “screws 1 x 6 up to 2 x 10, needles, thread, and a granite mug, plate, knife, fork, spoon, needles, thread, scissors, etc., etc., etc.”

Thus equipped, he set out at 5 p.m. on March 12, 1909, knowing he would be gone for a good long time. And yet, nowhere in his description of that departure did my grandfather mention anything about his family, an omission that probably speaks volumes. At the time, he was married and was the father of at least two children.

In fact, the entire journal contains only a single reference to his family — an oblique remark included toward the end of the trip, in which his wife and their offspring were identified simply as “they.”

“Clearly, he found domestic life irksome,” Philip Smith told me when I visited him at his home in Montreal's Côte-des-Neiges neighbourhood in June. “He was a man who put a lot of emphasis on his own autonomy.”

He would need to. It isn't everyone who would choose to make so difficult a journey, in late winter, alone. What's more, when he departed Quebec City, he possessed just one dog — a collie named Teddy — that had never been put to harness. As for a dogsled, he had none, or none in his immediate possession.

On the first leg of his journey, Ross travelled by train — or “electric car,” as he put it — a service that in those days ran from Quebec City to Saint-Joachim, 40 kilometres to the east. There, he got dinner and arranged for a horse-drawn sleigh and driver to bear him on the next leg, to Saint-Paul, 58 kilometres east of Saint-Joachim. He travelled all through the night, breakfasted in Saint-Paul, and immediately pushed on with another horse and driver.

He was clearly in a hurry. Before departing Quebec City, he had made inquiries and learned that the steamships that transported cargo and passengers along the north shore of the St. Lawrence would be resuming operations around mid-April that year, following their annual winter shutdown. That was just three weeks away, and you could safely bet that the first vessels would be carrying fur-trading agents from The Hudson's Bay Co. and Révillon Frères, as well as other large-scale purchasers. My grandfather aimed to beat them, just as he had done on similar if less ambitious fur-buying missions in 1906 and '07.

As he noted in his journal: “The first down would get the largest portion of the fur.”

Racing northeast by horse-drawn sleigh in the dead of the late winter night, he kept his one dog curled up at his feet for warmth. This far north, the sun rises early, and there was more than ample light for him to observe the changing terrain on his approach to Saint-Paul, as the broad snowbound flats of the St. Lawrence floodplain gave way to the sprawling, roller-coaster hills and valleys of the Charlevoix region. His route was bordered by dense forests of conifers and birch.

His main purpose now, apart from the need to keep on the move, was the gradual accumulation of dogs, a far greater challenge in 1909 than in other years, owing to an outbreak of canine distemper along the north shore, an epidemic that had already killed an estimated three-quarters of the dogs to be found along my grandfather's route. Nonetheless, by the time he reached the Saguenay River, he has managed to purchase three more dogs, for a total of four. Owing to its fast-moving current combined with the tidal ebb and flow of the St. Lawrence, the mouth of the Saguenay does not freeze over in winter, and so he was obliged to cross by boat, along with his horse, sleigh, driver, dogs and gear.

Once safely disembarked on the river's eastern shore, my grandfather pushed on by horse-drawn sleigh toward Portneuf, now known as Portneuf-sur-Mer, a village 84 kilometres east of the Saguenay. He had now entered what is generally considered the upper north shore of the St. Lawrence. It was at Portneuf that he planned to switch to dogsled, and it was here that he became mired in the first of the many imbroglios he would encounter on his long journey. On this occasion, the mix-up was serious enough that he felt his life or at least his welfare to be in some danger, and he mentioned for the first time — just in passing, mind you — that he always kept a revolver loaded and ready in his pocket “as it would never do to appear frightened.”

William Ross's 1909 journal is not a work of high art or grand passion but an understated and clear-eyed account of a lone man confronting the challenges and pleasures of travel over remote and difficult terrain. As a window onto one man's psyche, the journal hides almost as much as it reveals, but it does reveal a good deal. It certainly bears witness to my grandfather's pragmatic approach to setbacks. When confronted by adversity or challenge, his response was invariably the same: “I pushed on.” He repeats this phrase time and again in his journal and, time and again, this is exactly what he does — he pushes on — with no sign of complaint or self-pity, despite plenty of provocation.

When they hear the surname Ross mentioned in the same sentence as Quebec City, some people might think of Sir Charles Ross, a British aristocrat who invented the notorious Ross rifle and oversaw its manufacture at a factory he had built in the Quebec capital. That was around 1901, when Canadian forces were fighting alongside British troops during the Second Boer war in South Africa. Unfortunately, the Ross rifle was defective from the outset, and the Ross Rifle Co. was eventually bought out by the Canadian government at a cost of $2 million.

I mention this story for just one reason. I am not related in any way to the Quebec City Rosses who produced that eponymous but poorly designed firearm. For one thing, they were wealthy, and my ancestors for the most part were not, although some of them made out passably well.

On my grandfather's side of the family, we are all descended from my great-grandfather, Thomas Ross, a Protestant from Northern Ireland who was born in 1826 and came to Canada at an early age, settling in Quebec City. According to Philip Smith, he probably soon found work on the docks. In 1855, he married Anne Kennedy, who was born in Quebec City and was of Scottish or Northern Irish stock. He eventually rose to the level of stevedore. I don't want to get all huffy about this, but a stevedore — contrary to common perception — is not someone who performs manual labour on a wharf. Instead, a stevedore occupies a position several levels up the socio-economic totem poll, serving as a sort of contractor or middleman who provides gangs of dock-workers for a fee.

When Thomas Ross died at age 68 in 1894, the Morning Chronicle of Quebec City called him “the oldest and best-known stevedore of the port, having been loading vessels here for the last 40 years. He stowed the cargoes of the first Norwegian ships that came to the St. Lawrence. Mr. Ross was honest, upright and straightforward in all his dealings. He leaves a wife and a large family of grown up children, to whom we extend our sympathy.”

Together, Thomas Ross and his wife produced as many as 17 children, not all of whom survived very long. My grandfather, William Ross, was possibly the third in line of those who did. During the early years of his life, the fortunes of the family varied. They lived for some 13 years on Champlain St. in the relatively impoverished and lawless Lower Town, but later moved to the more prosperous Upper Town.

My grandfather spent his early adulthood in low-level clerical positions at one firm or another. To his credit, he spoke French in addition to English, which was by no means true of most Protestant anglos in Quebec City in those days. Also atypically, my grandfather seemed to get along easily with French Canadians, invariably treating them as companions and equals.

As for my family's stevedoring patriarch — my great-grandfather, Thomas Ross — I did manage to find his grave in the Mount Hermon Cemetery. He is buried beneath a rose-hued marble headstone, along with his wife, who died in 1919, a quarter-century after her husband passed on. She would have been 72 years old, and with a decade still to live, when her son William travelled by dogsled to Labrador in 1909, but there is no mention of his mother in his journal , just as there is barely any allusion to his wife or children.

3. Ups and downs

In which my grandfather very nearly gets mauled by an angry St. Bernard but triumphs in the end by acquiring a fifth animal for his dogsled team — and not a moment too soon.

After five days of travel, William Ross reached Portneuf, where his collie got into a fight with a much larger beast.

“Just as I came into Portneuf my dog Teddy, who is inclined to be a bit cross, undertakes to fight a large St. Bernard dog and I have some trouble to save him, but I succeed in doing so with the assistance of the owner of the big dog, and by using my whip freely on the big dog . . . but he don't forget the whipping and looks and growls at me very savage, and being an extra-large dog it does not increase my assurance of him. So I keep my revolver continually in my pocket where I can get it if I should require it, as it would never do to appear frightened as they are quick to perceive it and take advantage.”

Ever the opportunist, Ross followed up the altercation up by making an offer to buy the St. Bernard and soon reached an agreement with its erstwhile owner. “I now have five dogs,” he wrote.

And a good thing, too, as the only way ahead from Portneuf was by komatik, or dogsled. My grandfather managed to acquire a sled in Portneuf, as well as a set of dog harnesses, but this proved to be the easy part. The hard part was persuading the dogs to keep up their end of the bargain and pull.

“My dogs being strange to each other did not pull well together,” Ross wrote, “and Teddy, who has never been harnessed before, neither had he ever seen a sleigh or other dogs harnessed, would try to shake and get the harness off and would keep coming back to me.”

Somehow, despite these difficulties, Ross managed to keep his ornery dog team moving ahead at a decent pace. At least, they did not fall too far behind two other sleds, each with a six-dog team, that were being driven by a pair of mailmen travelling east from Portneuf.

The terrain was difficult, interrupted at frequent intervals by steep, snow-covered hills that were exhausting to climb but practically lethal to descend.

Still, there was a trick to the manoeuvre. First, you cut down a small tree, about eight to 10 centimetres in diameter at the base of the trunk. Next, according to Ross's instructions, you “fasten the butt onto the stern of the sleigh, untie from the sleigh all your dogs except the shaft dog, then chase them down the hill, then start your shaft dog with the loaded sleigh and get onto the tree which makes a splendid drag, untie same when you get to the bottom, throw the tree to one side, let those above know that you have landed and then make room for the next sleigh coming down, then harness up your dogs and when everybody is down, away you go until you come to the next hill, which more than likely is a hill to climb sometimes 250 feet high, angle 45 degrees.”

That night, following an arduous day in the snow, Ross and the two mailmen found shelter in one of the emergency cabins scattered at fixed intervals along the north shore of the St. Lawrence, rough structures where travellers could spend the night or ride out bad weather while en route. He set out early the next morning and arrived late that day at Bersimis — now Pessamit — where he put up for the night at the home of one Patrick Moloney, who was in charge of the telegraph station and post office in that town. But there was bad news the following morning. After asking around about the way ahead, Ross learned that he faced a difficult slog, “a succession of up and down hills” that take up most of the way beyond Manicouagan (now Baie-Comeau) beginning about 60 kilometres ahead. Normally, faced with the prospect of such terrain, he would take to the ice and trace the edge of the St. Lawrence, but from Manicouagan northeast to Pointe-des-Monts, he learned, the ice was already breaking up along a distance of 100 kilometres.

“The prospects are not bright,” he wrote, “unless I can succeed in getting a boat, which is not easy this time of year as there are no harbours to go into in the event of a storm.”

Thanks to the telegraph service, however, he managed to track down a certain William Morin in the town of Godbout, about 57 kilometres beyond Manicouagan, who had a large canoe and agreed to travel upstream and meet Ross at Pointe-aux-Outardes in order to ferry him down as far as the Mistassini River, undoubtedly for a price. It would be a difficult undertaking, however, through frigid water and broken ice and with a large cargo. In addition to Ross, there were five dogs, one seven-foot sled, one trunk and two bags, not to mention two paddlers.

Early on March 19, Ross set out for Pointe-aux-Outardes, a two-day excursion by sled. But late on the second day of the trek, he somehow lost his way.

4. A grandson sets out

I buy a ticket for the bus, set to depart at 1 p.m. from the Terminus d'Autobus de Gare du Palais in Quebec City, bound for La Malbaie, about two hours to the northeast.

It is gloomy and raining when I leave Quebec City that afternoon, on a journey that takes me along the Autoroute Dufferin-Montmorency, past the soaring neo-Romanesque Basilica of Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupré and into the proud green hills of Charlevoix.

Late that afternoon, the bus drops me off at Dépanneur Otis on Rue Sainte-Catherine in La Malbaie. I hoist my backpack and hike from there to the Econolodge hotel. A handsome town perched at the mouth of the Malbaie River, La Malbaie is dominated by its Roman Catholic church. (“Just ‘the church of La Malbaie,' ” says a woman in a beige jacket when I ask what the temple is called. “It doesn't have a special name.”) The handsome ochre brick presbytery at its side was built in 1908, which means it would have been freshly completed when my grandfather passed through here by horse-drawn sleigh the following year. At the time, the town was known as Murray Bay.

On that occasion, Ross paused only long enough to obtain some information regarding the road ahead, “which they tell me is impassable.” Typically, he pushed on.

I have dinner that night at “Mikes” sports bar near my hotel, in order to watch the Montreal Canadiens as they battle to a topsy-turvy win over the New York Rangers to stay alive in the Stanley Cup semi-finals, down two games to three. Later, it occurs to me to Google the Canadiens to see in what year they were founded. Just as I suspect: 1909.

5. Off course

In which my grandfather loses his way on the icy surface of a St. Lawrence tributary — probably the Rivière-aux-Outardes — and later recovers his proper route by plunging over a snow-bound cliff with his 200-pound cargo.

Ross set out for Pointe-aux-Outardes early in the morning of March 20. He put a dog named Quinzie in the lead because the animal was supposed to know the route, “as he has been over it several times.”

So much for the benefits of canine experience.

By late morning, he realized he had been travelling for several hours on what he thought was the shore of the St. Lawrence, but that turned out to be a tributary river, an inadvertent detour that had taken him far off course.

While retracing his way, he encountered a fur trapper named Louis Tremblay who was out checking his traps and agreed to act as a guide. This arrangement did not work out particularly well.

Granted, Tremblay got Ross safely to Pointe-aux-Outardes, where they arrived shortly before midnight and spent the night. But the following day proved to be nearly catastrophic — “a hard 21 miles” toward Manicouagan.

“The trail is so narrow and crooked,” Ross wrote, “that the shafts would hook the tree in front before the stern of the sleigh was well clear which necessitated a lot of pulling and shoving on my part.”

Worse, the two men lost their way again, this time while crossing an open plain of ice. The sleigh was so heavily weighed down by cargo that it was easier to send Tremblay ahead on foot to scout the way, while Ross followed with the dogs and komatik, tracking Tremblay's snowshoe prints. Around 5:30 p.m., with little daylight left, Ross overtook his guide, who had evidently chosen the wrong route. They now found themselves high atop a lofty bank overlooking the Manicouagan River from a height of about 150 feet, which was not where they meant to be at all. The bank itself was “near perpendicular.”

Briefly, they debated what to do.

“Well, it was not a pleasant proposition,” wrote my grandfather, “but it now had to be done or remain out all night, and as I was not anxious to remain out where I could avoid it, we got ready to fall over the bank.”

First, Tremblay unharnessed all the dogs except Rover, the shaft dog, and pushed them one by one over the precipice. Down they went. Then he felled a small tree and attached it to the sleigh's stern as a drag. Meanwhile, wrote my grandfather, “the shaft dog (was) all the time watching us and studying the bank and he was not anxious to go. In fact we had to use considerable force and coaxing to get him over.”

Ross estimated the weight of the sled's cargo at around 200 pounds, and so he ran a rope around the trunk of a standing tree to use as a snub and then settled himself onto the far end of the felled tree while “the sleigh etc. hung from the other end.” Tremblay crouched down by Rover, holding his head up so he wouldn't be smothered by the snow — and over the brink they went.

You'd have thought they had been doing this sort of thing all their lives.

“We slid to the bottom, not too fast as the snow was a bit soft, then after clearing everything of snow, we harnessed up the dogs, headed them across the river and arrived there between 7 and 8 p.m., and put on dry clothes and then got supper and Louie fed the dogs and put the harness all in good shape.”

“There” was Manicouagan, at the time a small trading post inhabited by no more than a handful of families. At Manicouagan, Ross learned that William Morin had already arrived by canoe from Godbout, although he had been obliged to leave the boat six miles downstream, as the rest of the way was blocked by solid ice.

The following morning, a horse-drawn sleigh bore Ross, Morin, and a colleague of Morin's onto the ice, where the canoe was waiting, and they proceeded downstream by boat, stopping for dinner at Mistassini River.

Following dinner, Ross pushed on by dogsled, covering a distance of 25 kilometres before arriving quite late at Godbout. There, he spent the night at the home of Napoléon-Alexandre Comeau, from whom he purchased a quantity of fur.

Two days later, Ross found himself in much less comfortable circumstances, alone with his sleigh a fair distance out on the ice-covered St. Lawrence, when the frozen surface beneath his feet began to shiver and groan.

My grandfather married twice. In 1894, his first wife, Miriam Beck, died of scarlet fever while in her mid-20s, just a few days after giving birth to their second son. She was unaware that their first born had perished of scarlet fever only a week or so earlier, aged 20 months.

The couple had been living in Montreal, but now Ross took his newborn son, named Thomas William Beck Ross, and returned to Quebec City to live with his newly widowed mother and his unmarried siblings. It was not until 1902, eight years after the death of his first wife, that Ross remarried, this time wedding Eliza Anne “Dadie” MacDonald.

I remember that, as children growing up in the country northwest of Toronto, my sisters and I were thrilled to learn we were descended from someone named MacDonald. It just seemed to follow naturally that we must also be descended from Sir John A. Macdonald, never mind the slight but critical difference in spelling. I believe I used to brag about it at school. I was descended from the first prime minister!

Except, of course, that I wasn't. I was descended from a man named William Oliver Kennedy Ross.

But back to my journey. I plan to depart La Malbaie around mid-morning on May 28, on a bus bound for Baie-Comeau, roughly a five-hour trip.

Vous avez 60 ans?”

Malheureusement

PourquoiC'est moins cher.

It is a gorgeous spring day, cool but cloudless, and the half-empty bus careens along a high green ridge overlooking the sparkling St. Lawrence, its south shore dimly visible in the morning light. A pair of freighters plow downstream through the chrome-like glare.

We reach the Saguenay River at about 12:30 p.m. and cross the broad blue expanse on a ferry named the Catherine Lagardeur, much as my grandfather must have done more than a century earlier on a barge of some kind. There was no bridge then, and there is no bridge now.

After stopping for lunch on the east shore of the Saguenay, we continue along Quebec's Route 138 to Portneuf, where my grandfather began the dogsled portion of his journey. Nowadays, the town is an elongated affair, arrayed along both sides of a single street called the Rue Blanc-du-Sable, and set right on the edge of the St. Lawrence. The bus makes a rest stop at a restaurant there, and two passengers hurry off the vehicle. They promptly light up and proceed to puff so feverishly on their cigarettes that you'd have thought they'd been prevented from breathing all that time on the bus. It occurs to me that my grandfather must have been an abstemious man. In his journal, he makes no mention of smoking or of ever taking a drink.

6. Risky ice, thwarted hunt

In which my grandfather narrowly escapes disaster by broken ice and later attempts to shoot a caribou but takes a drubbing instead.

On March 25, Ross set out from Pointe-des-Monts, aiming to reach Egg Island, now known as Île-aux-Oeufs. As usual, where possible he followed the shoreline of the St. Lawrence in order to stay clear of the dense and nearly impenetrable pine forests that crowd the vast river's banks. On this occasion, he ventured further out onto the river in order to follow a more direct route to Egg Island, a rocky islet peeking above the ice, home to a lighthouse and a few families dwelling along its one-kilometre length, connected to the mainland by a sandbar.

“After travelling about one hour,” my grandfather wrote, “I found (the ice) to be acting funny, so I decided to get ashore at the first opportunity, which was not easy as the ice between me and the shore was all broken up.

“I kept a close watch and I saw what was a likely place and turned my dogs in, but I had not gone far until I found myself in a bad position, small broken ice on all sides over which I had to go. I judged the tide was low as some of the ice was grounded, but still as some of this ice will ground in eight, 10, and 12 feet of water the prospects were not too bright.

“Speed was my only salvation, so encouraging my dogs on I got off the sleigh and kept running along, jumping from piece to piece — then my sleigh has gone in load and all, no, it is all right, the dogs had separated, half going to the right, the other half to the left to clear what was a bad open spot, with the result that the sleigh went right through the centre, but how fortunate, she has landed fairly on the small ice, with the speed and length of sleigh she has carried over safely, whereas had she landed too much to one side it would have been an upset, into the water and sink.”

He jumped back onto the sled, and arrived intact at Egg Island, along with his dogs and cargo. After unharnessing the dogs, he settled down with several locals “for a rest and chat.”

“We are not long talking,” he wrote, “until we see the whole sheet of ice which I had left less than an hour ago all break up and move out piece by piece.”

Several days later, meaning to head east from a village called Pentecost, Ross engaged a certain Phillip Molloy — the telegraph operator there — to serve as a guide along the next leg of his route.

Before reaching a village called St. Margaret's River, they slowed for a time in order to negotiate their way down a particularly steep hill. While waiting for Philip to manage his own dog team's descent, Ross caught sight of a young caribou as it wandered out of the bush below. He immediately reached for his rifle, but his own dogs mistook his movement for a signal to be off, and they dashed for the brink.

“I had to jump quick and snub them around a tree for which I got the skin all torn from my knuckles,” wrote Ross, “but it was either that or have everything smashed on the hill and more than likely a couple of dogs killed. So that spoiled my caribou hunt, to my disappointment.”

7. A town's life cycle

After a five-hour journey by bus, I reach Baie-Comeau in the mid-afternoon and check in at the Hotel La Caravelle, which overlooks the town from a steep rocky plateau. To most Canadians, Baie-Comeau is best known as the birthplace of former prime minister Brian Mulroney. When my grandfather passed through in 1909, the place was called Manicouagan, and it was miniscule. Since then, it has gone through almost a complete life cycle, from boom to post-boom and now to decline.

The older part of town, located near the St. Lawrence shore, is dominated by a huge papermill now owned by a company called Résolu Forestiers, whose sign on one wall of the building does not look very permanent and where jobs are said to be disappearing at a dismal rate.

The outlook was very different in 1937, when Robert Rutherford McCormick first showed up. Publisher of The Chicago Tribune, McCormick won exclusive logging rights on the Outarde and Manicouagan rivers. The catch was he had to build his paper mill here, and he did. For decades, Baie-Comeau was a prosperous town, but newspapers and paper products are no longer the businesses they once were, and the storefront windows in the commercial centre of old Baie-Comeau are nowadays apt to feature “à louer” signs.

One exception is Le Manoir du Café, a delightful little bistro overlooking Place La Salle in the heart of town. This is one Baie-Comeau business that seems to be doing a thriving trade. Almost right next door, the Galerie d'Art Claude Bonneau is an eccentric two-storey museum of sometimes fascinating odds and ends, including an antique motorcycle, diverse musical instruments, old-fashioned cameras and projectors, flat irons, a gasoline pump and even a stack of Toronto Star Weekly sections from the 1940s, all perfectly preserved, all accumulated by Bonneau himself. He is a frenetically productive artist who seems to paint only dancers, often in unexpected settings. He says he completes a painting a day.

Obviously an energetic man, Bonneau is sadly no longer representative of the town itself, whose major industry is struggling.

Late that afternoon, I board a bus bound for Sept-Îles, where I plan to meet a ferry called the Bella Desgagnés, which will bear me northeast along the north shore to Blanc-Sablon at the eastern tip of Quebec, a journey of four days or so. But this spring, the lower St. Lawrence has been badly clogged with treacherous ice. As a result, the Bella's schedule has been tossed out the window — or the porthole, I suppose — and nothing is certain.

8. Dog trouble

In which my grandfather attends to his dogs' paws, now badly cut up from encrusted snow, while enjoying generous hospitality and procuring a quantity of fur.

On April 1, Ross departed Seven Islands — now known as Sept-Îles — and over the next two weeks made his way through more than a dozen villages scattered along the north shore until he reached Natashquan, where his progress slowed — owing, paradoxically, to an improvement in the weather.

Springtime temperatures and bright sunshine had turned the snow to panes of crystalline ice that cut up the paws of his dog team. He tried fashioning dog shoes out of seal skin, but seal skin was in short supply. He resorted to canvas instead, but it quickly wore out. Some buffoon advised him to dab the dogs' paws in tar and then powder them with sawdust, which he did — a big mistake.

“I find that the tar dries and burns their feet so that they crack and are now much worse. So I get back to the shoes which consist of a bag large enough for the dog's foot, leaving them large enough for his paw to spread and two small holes to allow his claws to protrude.”

Thus equipped, he and his dogs limped into Kégashka on April 16. There, he received “quite a welcome” from the family of James Foreman, a prominent villager whose father, Samuel, migrated there from Halifax.

As at other stops along his way, my grandfather seemed to freely receive meals and a bed for the night. In some cases, he was no doubt already acquainted with local residents from his previous trips. Besides, he was likely welcome for the news and gossip he brought from Quebec City. But it strikes me that he could not have received the hospitality he did if he were not a companionable sort and a man of some charm, someone you'd be pleased to supply with a meal and bed in exchange for the pleasure of his conversation.

What seems just as remarkable is that Ross almost invariably managed to arrange lodging and meals in advance, usually thanks to the primitive telegraph service that connected north shore communities in those days, consisting of a network of telegraph operators linked by a single wire strung through hectares of bush or along slender wooden masts. One way or another, he was able to book his dinner and lodging requirements with not much more difficulty than I encountered a century later, armed with an iPad, a credit card and access to the Internet.

In Kégashka, Ross purchased a considerable quantity of fur and boasted in his diary of being a better judge of quality than many of the locals. It seems he knew his job well and took considerable pride in its performance. As on most such occasions, he did not carry away his newly purchased stock as part of his cargo but instead had it packed so that it could be shipped to him in Quebec City sometime later, when the weather had improved.

From Kégashka, he made his way to La Romaine and then pushed on toward Wolf Bay, but was deterred by broken ice and forced to swing inland, where the terrain was warped by more steep, snow-laden hills. So far, my grandfather had been lucky to avoid calamity in such circumstances, but here his luck ran out.

9. Sept-Îles

I arrive in Sept-Îles on a Thursday night and check into the Hotel Mingan, a fine little place with newly refurbished rooms and an excellent kitchen. I am under the impression that the ferry is running four days behind schedule and will reach Sept-Îles sometime Saturday on its downstream run. Now, just to be sure, I phone the ferry's operators and speak to Rachel Sourcy, who handles customer relations.

“Four days late ...?” she says. “Mais non.”

Owing to the bad ice conditions further downstream, there has been an additional delay. The Bella will now be seven days late when she docks in Sept-Îles, meaning I will be stranded here five days, until the following Tuesday. Well, there are certainly worse fates. A sprawling but orderly town set on a broad coastal flat, Sept-Îles is a surprisingly up-to-date place considering its remote location. It has plenty of big box stores, including a Walmart, if you like that kind of thing, as well as at least one branch of practically every fast food eatery known to humankind — McDonald's, A&W, Tim Hortons, St-Hubert, Subway. Three movies are playing at Cinema 1-2-3, including X-Men, Godzilla and L'autre femme.

On Sunday during my stay, there is even a grand rally of north shore bikers, more than 100 of them gathered with their machines in the Place du Ville, all clad in leather and denim, as Queen belts out “Fat Bottomed Girls” over a huge sound system. It is a sunny and mild spring day, and there is nary a dogsled in sight.

On Tuesday morning it rains, and I head for the Regional Museum on Avenue Laure, to bone up on north shore history. The territory includes about a quarter of Quebec's land mass, and for centuries its economy was based primarily on the fur trade, whose dominance lasted well into the 19th century. Other activities gradually grew in importance — fishing, lumbering, saw-milling, later to be joined by mining, aluminum smelting and hydroelectric generation.

Described as “a vast rocky plateau covered with unbounded forest,” the north shore has a history of human settlement going back 9,000 years. By the time my grandfather showed up, in the early 1900s, the inhabitants included Innu people, who have been here for about 2,000 years, as well as a smattering of European settlers, many of them bilingual fishermen originally from Jersey. They were later joined by English speakers, most of whom migrated from Newfoundland in the 19th century and whose descendants still speak with that emphatic Gaelic brogue. (Close your eyes, and you could imagine you are havin' a time at the Squid Jigger Lounge in Cape Broyle.) Nowadays, most north shore communities are predominantly English-speaking, with names like Harrington Harbour and Mutton Bay.

Quebec's Route 138 has slowly been extended along the north shore. In 1996, it reached as far east as Natashquan, and just last fall an additional leg was completed, from Natashquan to Kégashka. There are plans to eventually push the road all the way to Blanc-Sablon on the province's eastern tip, adjacent to the Labrador border.

On Tuesday evening, I check out of my hotel and take a taxi down to the port, where a cold wind and pelting rain thrash the pier, and where the Bella Desgagnés is already moored at the Pointe-aux-Basques.

I climb aboard.

10. More dog trouble

In which my grandfather watches helplessly as his sled and dog team tumble down a hill near Wolf Bay but manages to put things right and so pushes on to Harrington Harbour, spotting the carcass of a mad dog along the way.

As he gingerly proceeded across the rugged country southwest of Wolf Bay, Ross was pretty sure he had matters under control — “with one exception ...

“We had to go along and down a side hill. We done our best to keep things rightside-up but what a mess. The snow was very hard with no footing. I first kept below my sleigh but decided that there was the danger of her rolling over me as I had no footing to hold her, and sure enough away she went, rolling down the hill until she came in contact with the trees below, the dogs after (there was nothing broken, the chest never even untied for I had it well tied on), and when I got there I found the dogs all tangled up among the trees and as fast as I cleared a dog and let him go he was around another tree, so our only chance was unharness all the dogs, turn the sleigh up the hill, spread out the traces and started the dogs up and across the hill and by cutting the snow with our axes we succeeded in getting out all OK with nothing worse than some hard work and about 45 minutes lost time and I was pleased when I arrived at Wolf Bay where they were all expecting me.”

Two days later, on his way to Harrington Harbour, my grandfather passed a dead dog crumpled at the foot of a tall hill, another victim of the canine distemper that spread across the north shore that year. Later, he noted his own concern: “I expect that I am going to lose some of my dogs.”

My grandfather's journey proceeded more or less smoothly for the next few days. On April 21, a snowstorm forced him to spend the night in what he called Nabitibi, probably the Rivière de Napetipi. The following day, he pushed on to Old Fort, and his journal here includes several quirky sketches of local residents, including a certain Mr. Willis, “who used to teach school but has now given it up as he prefers a quieter life and has started a small store of knick-knacks and does some shooting and I think he trades in birds wings (snowbirds, white partridge, etc.).”

During the days that follow, however, Ross encountered a series of setbacks. Despite his best efforts, the dogs' paws were badly cut up by the hardened, encrusted snow. Worse, several of his dogs, including his original collie, Teddy, were showing signs of distemper themselves. Meanwhile, my grandfather badly wanted to cross the Strait of Belle Isle to Newfoundland, but the channel was in lethal shape — jammed with ice and beset by treacherous currents. The crossing is something that nobody “has ever dared to do . . . this time of the year,” he wrote.

But he was determined to try.

11. On the ferry

The Bella Desgagnés went into service last fall, working a weekly schedule along the St. Lawrence's north shore from Rimouski (on the south shore) to Blanc-Sablon, with 10 intermediate ports of call.

Primarily a cargo vessel, the ferry also has 63 cabins for passengers, and I repair at once to my own, a narrow but sleek affair on a lower deck with a porthole on the port side. It strikes me now that my chosen mode of transport bears far more similarity to the large steamers used by big-time fur traders around 1909 than to the scrambling dog team that propelled my grandfather along the same route. While contemplating this conundrum, I make my way to the Bella's dining room, where waitresses Sylvie and Elizabeth await, along with my fellow passengers, roughly a dozen in number, almost all of them Quebeckers on holiday. Dinner this evening is excellent — vegetable soup, followed by a main course of roast beef, mashed potatoes, Brussels sprouts and stuffed tomatoes, accompanied by a half bottle of Ruffino Chianti.

It is almost midnight when we leave port, and I am awakened by the shuddering of the vessel and the faint hum of its engines. I climb out of my berth and peer out the porthole as the Bella approaches its “economical average speed” of 12.5 knots and as the shadows of the north shore race past.

12. Even more dog trouble

In which my grandfather suffers a serious dog bite but manages to treat himself with modern medicine, while he prepares for a dangerous crossing of the ice-packed Strait of Belle Isle.

At Blanc-Sablon, two of my grandfather's dogs fell ill with distemper, but he was able to treat them with pills he had acquired along the way. Because of the dogs' weakened condition, however, he acquired three more animals and so pushed on, crossing the border from Canada into Labrador, which was then a British colony.

At L'Anse-Amour, one of his newly purchased dogs turned vicious and bit him on the hand “in three different places, putting her teeth right through my finger.” He treated the wound with carbolic acid and hot water and applied a bandage, intending to go right back out and impose his will on the offending beast, to tame her. But the dog ran away. Residents of the nearby village of L'Anse-au-Loup captured the animal. Having already heard of her sins, they killed the dog and reported back to my grandfather, concerned that he might now contract rabies. As treatment, they recommended that he place the dead dog's liver on his wounded hand, “which amused (my grandfather) very much.

“I thanked them but I was quite satisfied with a good poultice after having it washed thoroughly with the carbolic acid for the first day with repeated washings twice a day and an application of carbolated Vaseline and then bandaged.”

By this time, Ross had found at least two men who were willing to brave the Strait of Belle Isle with him, in spite of the danger. One of these was Earnest Doane, manager of the Cooperative Store in West St. Modeste in Labrador, and the other was Archie Demarah of L'Anse-au-Clair, who had been serving my grandfather as his Labrador guide. But Demarah changed his mind the next day “as he consider(ed) the risk too great.”

In the end, another man from L'Anse-au-Clair by the name of George Haskel agreed to pitch in. It is not clear what had become of my grandfather's dogs and komatik; he may have sold them. On May 8, he got word from Doane, the store manager, that the ice had separated enough to permit an attempt. Haskel was summoned, and the three men set out in a frail wooden dory at 5:45 a.m.

13. Wandering in the dark

We reach Havre-Saint-Pierre at about 7 p.m. on Wednesday beneath lowering skies. By this time, I have befriended two fellow passengers on the Bella Desgagnés, Marcel Paradis, a former law professor from Montreal, and his wife, Louise, and we are out on the foredeck as the ship manoeuvres her way into port. But that isn't what gets us excited. It's the seals cavorting in the dark water between our vessel and the shore — not to mention an orca whale. The great black mammal breaches and dives nearby or does slow rolls, seeming to melt into the cold grey waters of the St. Lawrence.

During the ensuing days, the weather remains consistently dismal — low clouds and fog, a cold wind, frequent rain. For the most part, unless we are in port, we cannot see the shore. Owing to the upheaval in the Bella's schedule, caused by ice further downstream, some of our landings are poorly timed for passengers. We reach Natashquan — home of celebrated Quebec chanteur Gilles Vigneault — at 6:30 in the morning, in time for a brief stroll and not much else.

Several hours later, the Bella docks at Kégashka, a quaint English-speaking settlement of about 125 people who support themselves mainly by venturing out in squat fishing boats to catch snow crab. The first English-speaking settler here was Samuel Foreman who arrived from Halifax in 1855. He was the father of the very James Foreman who gave my grandfather a memorable welcome on his journey in 1909. Later, outside St. Philip's Anglican church, I bump into April Kippen, whose cousin, Ruth Kippen, runs the Auberge Le Brion just outside the village. Ruth, it turns out, is a great-granddaughter of that same James Foreman. April even has a photo of the man, depicting an austere and elderly fellow with a massive white beard who is engaged in a staring contest with a somewhat intimidated-looking cow.

We reach Harrington Harbour, said to be the prettiest town on the entire north shore, at a little after 1 a.m. on Friday morning — not exactly ideal. Still, I venture ashore and stroll through the darkness along a whimsical network of boardwalks that serve local residents in lieu of streets. There are no cars, just ATVs. Right now, everyone in town is sound asleep, which makes me feel slightly creepy as I wander past their shuttered windows.

After an hour or so, I return to the small wharf where the Bella is still off-loading cargo. Across the dock, you can purchase snow crab, scallops, lobster, halibut, turbot and cod at the Lower North Shore Community Seafood Co-operative, or you can if it is open. But at two o'clock in the morning, it is not.

14. Drifting out to sea

In which my grandfather attempts a perilous crossing of the Strait of Belle Isle in a small wooden dory, only to be carried away by drifting ice.

Ross's crossing of the narrow strait separating Labrador and Newfoundland began well but quickly turned treacherous as the wind mounted, blowing from the north-northeast and threatening to overwhelm the three men — Ross, Earnest Doane and George Haskel — and the boat they were sailing in.

“We are compelled to take down our sail,” my grandfather wrote. “The sea is beginning to roll high and we must turn (the dory) head-on. Earnest is working the oars. The tide and wind is working us up to the ice, we must keep away or we will be dashed to pieces if we are driven to it and yet we must get shelter as the sea will soon be too much for our little dory ... Our only hope is in getting an opening in the field of ice which extends as far as the eye can see.”

The men finally spotted a gap in the floe, but the trick was to reach it. If they shifted direction, so that their boat took the swell side-on, they would surely be swamped.

“Our only chance is to keep her head-on and allow the wind to blow us back which we do and get in behind some heavy ice and after rowing through it for a while we are forced to haul our boat onto it as it has closed on us.”

The men's trials were far from over, but they did the sensible thing and hunkered down on the ice to eat. It was 11 a.m., and they had been labouring for more than five hours straight. Lunch consisted of “cheese, buns, biscuit and chocolate with some good fresh water from our jar to wash it down.”

Once the meal was done, the men scaled a substantial iceberg in order to search ahead for open water. They saw a lake-size stretch not far off, and so they tossed away their grapnel and other heavy articles in order to reduce the dory's weight. They dragged the boat across the ice, eased her back into the water, and rowed across the open expanse until they reached more ice. There, they wrestled the dory back up onto the floe and hauled her toward the shore, where they could already make out individual houses.

Then they noticed a “very large iceberg” about a kilometre to the east and remarked to one another how quickly it seemed to be approaching them. A short while later, they realized their error. It was not the iceberg that was racing westward toward them. Instead, it was the ice floe they were standing upon that was being carried rapidly toward the east.

“At this rate of speed,” Ross wrote, “we will soon be towards the ocean.”

They redoubled their efforts, dragging their boat across the ice, but they were still being carried out to sea.

15. Surrounded by ice

On Friday, mid-morning, I climb back onto the foredeck of the Bella Desgagnés and gaze around. We are gliding through a narrow channel across glassy grey waters. The clouds have lifted somewhat, enough to reveal our immediate surroundings — flanked on both sides by archipelagos of treeless granite slabs upholstered with lichens and moss. The Bella winds its careful way past small, widely scattered icebergs. Soon we reach open water, and the fog rolls back in.

Late that morning, we moor at La Tabatière, which despite its Gallic name is mainly a community of English-speakers. A local man named Ivan Smith agrees to give a few of us a tour in his pickup truck. We pile in, a group that includes Jean Gauthier, a retired topographer from Ottawa, and his grown daughter Michelle, who now lives in Parry Sound.

Wearing a baseball cap and speaking with a sumptuous Newfoundland accent, Smith brings us up to date on local affairs as he propels his truck along a winding dirt road toward the adjoining community of Mutton Bay (or Baie-des-Moutons, as it is formally known).

Near Mutton Bay, we climb a boardwalk that mounts a rocky slope and soon find ourselves atop a breezy ridge overlooking the town below, a necklace of tidy little houses and a single church strung around a slender bay bordered by rocks. About 100 people live in the place, says Smith, and two-thirds of them are over age 65. Most of the young people leave and don't come back.

Beyond La Tabatière, the icebergs become more numerous, although they are still small. That night, however, our vessel slows to a crawl and bangs and crashes her way through floes of dense but broken ice while sounding her fog horn in the thickening brume.

I rise at 5 a.m. and again climb to the lofty foredeck. It is June 7, we are moored at Blanc-Sablon and nearly all I can see is ice.

16. Newfoundland at last

In which my grandfather narrowly escapes disaster on his crossing to Newfoundland, where he purchases more fur and tries to find a way to leave.

When last we saw them, Ross and his two Labrador companions were stranded on an ice floe drifting quickly toward the Atlantic Ocean, but their luck changed just in time. Maybe it was the current that slowed, or else a phalanx of grounded icebergs was now preventing the sheets of ice from speeding east at their previous clip. Either way, the three men and their beached dory were about a kilometre from the Newfoundland shore when a rescue party arrived.

“A couple of men come out and give us a help and we get in at Shoal Cove below Poverty Cove,” Ross wrote. “I look at my watch and it is five minutes after 6 p.m.”

The crossing had taken them more than 12 hours of nearly constant struggle, almost killing them in the process. But my grandfather's reaction was typically insouciant. In his journal, he summed up the adventure as “a very good day's work.”

The two men who helped them ashore (a Mr. Stephens and his brother) were surprised to learn that the three new arrivals had made the crossing of their own free will, rather than being the survivors of a shipwreck, which was what they had assumed. In any case, they invited this lunatic Canadian and his two companions back to their home for a hot cup of tea.

And this, to be honest, marks the effective if not the actual end of my grandfather's great odyssey of 1909. True, he remained in Newfoundland for at least a month, but the entries in his journal grew less frequent, and much of his time was spent in unsuccessful attempts to leave. His journal does not mention what became of his courageous companions, Haskel and Doane, but for his own part it seems he decided it would be wiser not to attempt a return trip to Labrador by dory.

Instead, he travelled up and down Newfoundland's northern peninsula — partly by dogsled, partly on foot and sometimes by boat — purchasing furs along the way and trying to connect with a steamer that might bear him to Labrador and thence back up the St. Lawrence to Quebec City.

Owing to the severe ice conditions, however, no ship was able to make the journey.

“It is now three weeks since I have sent word home,” he wrote on June 8 in what proved to be the final entry in his journal, “and with no telegraph communications I patiently wait for the steamer that I may be able to get where I can wire home as they don't know where I am nor what has happened.”

This is the document's sole reference to my grandfather's family.

At his chronicle's end, William O.K. Ross was stranded in the Bay of Islands on Newfoundland's eastern coast, apparently as a paying passenger aboard a steamer that had twice set out for Labrador only to return both times, owing to the impenetrable ice. But he was still hoping to push on.

17. My grandfather's final chapter

I have only the sketchiest of notions about my grandfather's life following his 1909 excursion. He did manage to return to Quebec City, and his apparently distant relations with his family did not immediately collapse. Over the next four years, he and his second wife produced two more children, including my father and namesake, in 1911, and my aunt Sonnette, in 1913. That made a total of four offspring, all now dead. I don't know what became of his son by his first marriage.

Around 1910, the Ross family of Quebec City moved to Montreal, where my grandfather worked in a variety of office jobs connected to the fur industry. As late as 1935, when he would have been 71, he was still listed in the Montreal directory as a furrier. By this time, according to members of my family, he had been alienated from his wife and children for many years, and now his own fortunes collapsed.

“His health had broken down, and his behaviour seems to have become erratic,” writes Philip E. L. Smith in his introduction to the journal. “Just how he earned his living and passed his days we do not know . . . It might be an exaggeration to call him homeless, but he may have had no fixed address or moved frequently among rooming houses.”

Still, blood is thick, and my grandfather's grown children rescued him from this fate and arranged for him to live with a family in Ormstown, then a small Quebec community near the New York border. The host family consisted of a car dealer named Wallace Orr, his wife and their daughter Eleanor, who later remembered their elderly boarder as “rather uncommunicative, semi-invalid, tranquil and good-humoured for the most part but unpredictable and, at times, impulsive,” according to Smith.

“He had certain phobias such as a strong dislike of cats and a fear of thunderstorms ... He showed no interest in children or young people, and displayed only polite interest in his own daughters during their dutiful visits to Ormstown twice a year ... He was fond of dogs.”

William Oliver Kennedy Ross died “of general debility” on Aug. 31, 1942, when he was 78. There seems to be no record of his burial, and his place of interment remains a mystery, the final disappearing act of a vanishing man.

18. Stranded in St. Barbe

I pay just $6.60 for the two-hour voyage aboard a venerable ferry named the Apollo, which crunches through the ice and out to open water, bearing us across the Strait of Belle Isle from Blanc-Sablon to Newfoundland, following much the same route that nearly killed my grandfather.

With several new friends, I huddle in the observation lounge near the ferry's bow and watch a succession of blue icebergs drift past. Jean Gauthier and his daughter Michelle have arranged for his car to be shipped along with them, and they drive me from the ferry landing at St. Barbe, N.L., into the town itself. They are heading north while I want to go south, and so they drop me off at the Dockside Motel, where I set about exploring my travel options.

It so happens that St. Barbe — population about 400 — is not an easy town to leave. There is no bus service, no car rental agency, no nearby airfield that has flights to any place I want to go. I feel pretty stupid. It is 2014, after all, more than 100 years since my grandfather made his memorable journey. Armed with only a komatik, a dog team and his wits, he got all the way from Quebec City to Newfoundland while suffering no more than a scuffed hand and a dog bite. A century later, I cannot even make my way out of St. Barbe. I spend a rainy, frustrating afternoon, unable to think what I should do. The next morning, I decide to hitchhike.

I remember that the morning ferry from Blanc-Sablon is to arrive at 11 a.m. Maybe I can catch a ride in one of the vehicles coming ashore. I hoist my backpack and hike down to the ferry landing, roughly a kilometre away. The Apollo docks right on time.

I catch a ride that bears me down the northern peninsula, past the Bay of Islands and around the monumental massifs of Gros Morne National Park, all the way to the airport at Deer Lake, where I am just in time for an Air Canada flight to Halifax, with a connection to Montreal.

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